Earthstone

by P. M. Biswas

  “You say you belong to the army,” the queen continued. “Will you belong to them more if you offer yourself upon the altar of war before the gods and the law permit you to? That is not how belonging works, Tam. Not true belonging. If they are your family, so are you theirs. If you were to be needlessly harmed or lost in battle, you would be mourned by those who remain.” Emeraude’s features clouded with sorrow. “It is already tragic to lose those who venture forth when they are of age, after they have been trained to the fullest in order to prolong their lives as much as possible. It would be doubly tragic if the kingdom of Astaris began to sacrifice its children too.”

  Tam hung her head. An unwilling shame twisted itself around her heart, a wire of thorns that pierced even her stubborn pride.

  “Look at me, Tam.”

  Tam couldn’t. She just—she couldn’t.

  “Tam.” Emeraude said her name so gently. “Look at me.”

  Inevitably, Tam looked up. Emeraude’s gentleness was even more difficult to resist than her sternness.

  “Ask of yourself only what your parents would ask of you,” Emeraude suggested. “Would they ask you to join this war sooner than you ought to?”

  Tam just stood there, frozen to the spot. Her ears burned. Her hands were knotted into fists behind her back. She had no notion of what to do with those fists—whether to beat down the wall between her and the army, or whether to plunge them into the earth, where her parents’ bones were buried, and ask those bones what her parents would have wished for her.

  She’d been so certain that her mother would have advised her to pursue her own goals, that her father would have trained her for combat himself.

  Now she wasn’t so certain.

  That uncertainty felt like a weakness, a sickness, a disease of consumption dissolving her confidence from within. Tam hated it.

  Uncertainty was unnatural to Tam. She relished living in constant certainty, in the mirror-bright clarity of mind that it gave her—no doubts, no fears, only direction and resolve.

  Emeraude reached for the enameled tray on her desk, piled with sweetmeats as it was, and held it out to Tam like a peace offering. Tam reflected on how surreal it was for a queen to serve pastries to a subject.

  Tam picked up a tart with berries on it and chewed on it mechanically. It tasted like sand.

  “Simion and Zara rescued my husband on that fateful day eight years ago when Danis attacked our border. But in rescuing their king, they gave themselves over to death. They were heroes, staying behind to fight so that he might survive. I owe them—and you—a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.”

  Tam drew in a breath. This was it. This was the reason Emeraude was even meeting with her and why Tam was granted access to the queen’s private study when no other peasant was. This was why Emeraude saw Tam annually on the anniversary of her parents’ deaths and why she asked Borik for periodic reports on Tam’s training.

  It was just that Emeraude was grateful. That was all.

  But that was also why Tam shared an extraordinary kinship with Emeraude, and why it sometimes seemed as if her parents were speaking to her through the queen. It hurt Tam to hear her parents’ names spoken by Emeraude, but it was simultaneously a solace that Tam’s parents were so dearly and reverently remembered. The queen had dedicated headstones to them in the royal cemetery, with their graves on either side of King Ulster’s. After all, they had been promoted to being his personal bodyguards shortly before their deaths, and they had followed him everywhere.

  “Unfortunately, in the irony to end all ironies, my beloved husband succumbed to his illness and perished not four weeks later.” Emeraude inclined her head pensively. “Do you ever blame him—blame us—for that? That your parents had to die for a man who was doomed to die anyway?”

  “No,” Tam said fiercely, and just like that, her certainty was back, flaring up in her like a white-hot flame. “No. I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t disrespect them like that. They told me that there was nothing more sacred than choice, and that Astar had given us free will so that we might choose our own destinies. They chose to die for their king. That was all. They would not have died if they had not willed it. As their daughter, how can I not heed the will of my parents? How can I not heed their legacy, when their legacy was that I should have a will of my own?”

  Emeraude was observing her with an odd expression, part pride and part indulgence, and it was such a motherly expression that Tam immediately understood what Emeraude had intended to accomplish by asking that question. Emeraude had posed it deliberately, to bring Tam back to Tam’s natural self.

  Such was the queen’s kindness.

  Suddenly humbled by having that kindness directed at her, Tam got choked up. She hung her head again to conceal just how moved she was. Tam wasn’t accustomed to displaying vulnerability. Or to displaying anything that wasn’t bravado.

  “Wh-what,” Tam asked, although it wasn’t her place to do so, “what is the latest news from the front?”

  Emeraude sighed. “It isn’t good. Axenborg’s messengers to us have ceased coming, which can only mean that Danis is close to breaching Axenborg’s defenses, perhaps even so close that King Korbyn of Axenborg cannot afford to dispatch any messengers lest they be killed. But worry not,” she added when Tam quailed. “We have been receiving missives via pigeons rather than heralds, and Axenborg has not yet fallen. The troops we’ve been sending to them every few months have aided them in preserving their sovereignty… and our own.”

  Tam slumped in relief. Mayhap Emeraude was holding back just how dire Axenborg’s plight was—Tam sensed that Emeraude was not being completely forthcoming—but Tam had to trust her. Tam had to trust that everything would be all right, that the war would drag on in this limbo until it ultimately led to Danis’s downfall.

  “Enough about war. Younglings should play, not fret, and even if they do, all they should fret about is wandering too far in their play and being captured by the vicious elves of the Wanderwood.”

  “I’m not six,” Tam said indignantly. “I’m not enthralled by tales of bogeymen.”

  Emeraude chuckled. “Aren’t you? You’re enthralled by tales of war, and that’s the greatest bogeyman of all.” Still indulgent, she said, “My son hasn’t seen you in a fortnight. He’s been asking me where you’ve been. Would you care to take a detour to the library on your path out of the palace? He’s drowning in books as usual, but he’ll appreciate it if you drop by.”

  Tam brightened. Perhaps this was just a further ploy of the queen’s to lift Tam’s mood, but if it was, it was succeeding. Besides, Prince Kay was always happy to see her, just as she was always happy to see him. He and Tam had been friends ever since Tam’s parents had become royal guards. After the deaths of the king and of Tam’s folks, Kay had been there to share her grief. In spite of their differing ranks, they had both lost those dearest to them. It had created an unusually powerful bond between them.

  Like Emeraude, Kay did not place much importance on social standing when it came to forging friendships, but unlike Emeraude, Kay was not disconcertingly perceptive. It was a winning combination. Tam was not overly fond of having her skin peeled back for Emeraude’s inspection, regardless of Emeraude’s genuine affection for her. With Kay, Tam could relax and be herself without fear of having her psyche poured through the fine sieve of another’s perception.

  Tam bid farewell to Emeraude somewhat hastily, and saluted the sentry as she departed. She trotted down hallway after hallway, craning her neck to ogle the floor-to-ceiling tapestries that dangled between the marble busts of past rulers. The rulers all sported identical disdainful moues of aristocratic superiority. They looked constipated, to be honest, with their uniformly downturned brows and pinched mouths. It was hilarious.

  Tam managed to nick an apple from the royal kitchen on her way to the library, even though she wound up getting chased out of the larder by an elderly cook brandishing a ladle like a club.

  The library was easier
to get into, on account of Kay’s sentries being stationed at the entrance. They, unlike Emeraude’s sentry at the study, recognized her from her many visits to Kay. The sentry guarding the queen’s study today was new, but now he would be acquainted with Tam as well. It was weird, being accepted among the royal sentries, but Tam disregarded it just as she did the weirdness of being friends with a prince. Her life was weird enough as it was.

  While Tam didn’t cherish the library as much as Kay did—Kay would literally marry it if he could—she did like the ink-and-parchment scent of it. It had the hallowed silence of a temple, of an ancient shrine that preserved the wisdom of centuries. The long, winding rows of shelves were dizzyingly tall, with wheeled wooden ladders wedged against them that creaked under any climber’s weight. The shelves had been constructed in a spiral that circled around the center of the library. The spiral tightened as Tam ventured farther into it, the rows growing narrower and narrower until Tam had to crabwalk sideways to get through them, sneezing as stray dusty pages brushed her nose and as protruding spines snagged on her hair.

  Kay was seated at a wide oak table at the library’s core, his lanky frame folded into a large claw-footed chair whose bosomy padding all but swallowed him up. His hair, a lighter auburn than his mother’s, was sticking out in wild curly tufts as he bent over a book, and he had an anemic pallor to him, tawny though he was due to his father’s slightly swarthier coloring. His book was a gigantic tome with a maroon sleeve of worn, patchy velvet.

  That wasn’t the only reading material on the table. Open scrolls spilled off its surface, and towers of books teetered precariously close to the table’s edge. Tam gingerly shifted a tower aside before hopping onto a corner of the table and crunching into her apple. Loudly.

  It must’ve not been loud enough, because Kay remained nose-deep in—Tam squinted at the title—a treatise on healing potions by a writer named Divinian Divinous. Was it a pseudonym? It had to be. But it was such an awful pseudonym that the author must’ve been drunk on one of their own “healing potions” when they invented that name. Borik called mulled mead a healing potion—the quickest acting there was, in fact. Tam agreed with him.

  Tam crunched louder and louder, until the noise became downright obnoxious. The other visitors to the library grimaced discreetly in disapproval.

  Eventually Kay shooed absently in Tam’s general direction.

  “Oi, bookworm,” Tam said finally, tired of waiting.

  Kay’s head snapped up. “Tam?” His eyes were bloodshot. “I…. What’re you doing here?”

  “Your mother sent me. She might’ve just sent me to remind you that you exist in the mortal realm and inhabit a mortal coil, and that your coil needs to be fed at regular intervals. When did you last eat?”

  “Er….”

  “You have no idea, do you?”

  “I vaguely recall a pheasant.”

  “As in, a pheasant in a woodcut from a hundred years ago, or a plucked, roasted, spiced pheasant from the kitchen?”

  “The latter, I’d say. There were no feathers on it.” Kay frowned. “I think.”

  “And when did you have this grand meal of possibly feathered pheasant?”

  Kay gesticulated at his books. “Before the atlas of Norvald and after the collection of religious poetry about Astar.”

  Tam sighed. “Let me guess. You must’ve been fed some pheasant for dinner yesterday. Yes, yesterday. Because—and you may not have noticed this—you reek. Have you bathed today?”

  “Who died and appointed you my quee—um.” Kay stumbled to a stop, evidently appalled by what he’d just said. “Did I almost commit treason by prophesying the death of the reigning monarch?”

  “Don’t you already have an answer to that? You’ve read over fifty thousand pages of constitutional law, haven’t you? You keep gloating about every thousandth page you read.”

  “I’m nine pages away from my next thousandth.” Kay beamed. “And you’re right, I do have the answer. I didn’t commit treason. Thankfully I wasn’t prophesying, merely contemplating. My motive was lacking.”

  “I bet your mother would be very interested in you splitting hairs about the legal definition of motive. Since you’re her heir and stand to gain from her assassination.”

  “Don’t ever say that to her, not even in passing. She’ll have me sit in on those interminable property disputes so that I can split hairs productively.” Kay shuddered. “The mind-numbing boredom will kill me before it kills her.”

  “You won’t be able to avoid arbitrating disputes when you’re on the throne.”

  “Which is why my remaining years of freedom are even more precious to me.” Kay snapped his fingers. “Aha! If anything, I have motive to prolong the current queen’s reign by every means available to me. Only her reign saves me from my much-hated duties.”

  “A stellar rebuttal.” Tam nodded sagely. “A lawyer could not have outdone it.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “I was being sarcastic. But… how about we trade favors?”

  “Favors?”

  Tam hesitated. Kay would do whatever Tam asked even if it wasn’t a trade, but without that trade as a front, Tam couldn’t lower herself so abjectly before her friend. Their friendship was based on a perceived sense of equality, and if that crumbled, so would their effortless banter and all the joy that came with it. “Let’s say I fail to mention to your mother that you routinely envision her demise—”

  “It’s—it’s not routine!”

  “—and as a result of my magnanimous omission, you dodge getting assigned to approximately five millennia of court arbitration so that you may more effectively employ your skills.”

  “More effectively employ my…. By Astar, you even sound like her.”

  “In recompense, let’s say you pay me back by failing to mention that you snuck me out of the palace.”

  Kay gaped at her. “Are you joking?”

  “I’m not. We can do it tomorrow.”

  “And this has naught to do with the scouts marching out tomorrow morning? That’s too much of a coincidence. You’ll be caught in a jiffy.”

  “No, I won’t be,” Tam insisted. “Because you’ll be making a spur-of-the-moment decision to go on a hunt with me as your squire.”

  “I already have a squire.”

  “That doddering ol’ fellow with ague? C’mon. You haven’t retired him only because he was your father’s squire and you can’t bring yourself to fire him. He won’t be of much assistance with an activity as vigorous as a hunt. He can’t even ride a horse with his arthritis, the miserable sod. Taking me along will be perfectly legitimate. I’ve gone with you on excursions before.”

  “Yes, herb-picking excursions. I’ve been researching healing potions to help with the recovery of our wounded soldiers, and those potions must have specific herbs as their ingredients. But I informed my mother I wouldn’t be going on any more herb-picking trips this month, since I have enough of a stock to do some brewing of my own, and—”

  “Precisely. That’s why this isn’t a typical excursion. It’s a hunt.”

  “Me? Going on a hunt? My mother will wonder if I’m coming down with something.”

  “Nonsense. You’re a brash young man thirsty for the gory murder of the nearest boar.”

  Kay looked ill. “No, I’m not. Me going on a hunt will be as obvious a ploy as any.”

  “Not if you’re allegedly only going on the hunt because you’re smitten with the Royal Huntsman.”

  “N-no,” Kay stuttered, “I’m not!”

  “Every bairn and its grandma knows you’re smitten with the Royal Huntsman. Except for the Royal Huntsman. He’s the only human being you notice that isn’t a character in a book.”

  “I notice you.”

  “Yes, but I’m a girl. And you don’t fancy girls.”

  “What about you? You don’t fancy anyone. Unless it’s your spear.” Kay leered. “Which, speaking of phallic symbolism….”

  “Shut up.�
� Tam shoved playfully at Kay. “Gods, you’re incorrigible.”

  “I’m incorrigible? Do none of the mirrors you encounter function correctly?”

  “I don’t have ‘encounters’ with mirrors, you narcissist.”

  “And I don’t have encounters with spears.”

  They proceeded shoving at each other until a throat cleared behind them, and they both whirled guiltily to see the crotchety librarian glowering at them.

  “Heavens, no,” Kay whispered in horror. “I’ve committed a cardinal sin. I’ve caused a disturbance in the library. And all because of you! What if Madame Bundifoot never allows me in the library again?”

  “You’re the prince. How can she ban you?”

  “My princehood is irrelevant. To Madame Bundifoot, the library is a sanctuary where we are all equals in our quest for knowledge.”

  “Uh-huh,” Tam said dubiously. “Don’t act like you wouldn’t sneak into the library even if you were barred from it.”

  “An excellent observation.” Kay relaxed. “Very well. Having gained an understanding of why you want to break into the army, I shall help you. And when you find my head on a pike upon your glorious return, you will know that my beheading was all your fault.”

  Tam rolled her eyes. “Don’t be dramatic.”

  “I’m being dramatic? I’m not the one volunteering myself as a lamb to the slaughter!”

  “I am no lamb.”

  “No, you’re too tough to be as tender as a lamb. Your meat would be unpleasantly stringy. Which is why I’d like to spare you your slaughter. You wouldn’t be edible. Not even the dastardly elves of the Wanderwood would feast on your flesh.”

  “Is that cannibalistic allegory your way of protecting me?”